Plague Child (32 page)

Chapter 38

Matthew wanted to dump the two bodies that had travelled with me into the pit, not just to get rid of them, but because three was a lucky number. I would not hear of it. Ghastly they might look, I said, but they had been my companions on what I thought was my last journey, and they deserved a better resting place.

‘You are a strange one, Tom,’ he said. ‘You always were, and I do believe you always will be.’

But he allowed me my whim, and we found a spot under a willow, which Matthew said had a kinder spirit than the yews further downstream. I told him I was glad of that, for I might like to be buried there, if a church could not be found for me.

He paused on his spade. ‘Why are you talking about your burial, Tom? I have every intention of going first.’

‘Why?’ My voice faltered. ‘I was with them. And they died of the plague.’

‘Ah.’ He dug a little longer and looked at me searchingly. ‘Are you a little hot?’

‘Yes, yes. I am.’

He felt my forehead, my pulse, and then squeezed my groin. ‘Is it tender here?’

I winced in pain. ‘Yes, yes! How long do I have?’

‘Oh, Tom, Tom . . . you will bury me yet.’

‘Don’t make game of me. Tell me the truth.’

He held me. ‘You’re much braver than I am. And taller. And a soldier.’

‘That doesn’t make me any less afraid.’

‘No. But it should tell you what this is.’ He turned the corpse with the opalescent eye over.

‘A musket wound.’

‘And this?’ He pointed to a terrible wound which had half-severed the neck from the body.

‘A sabre cut! They’re soldiers – they died of their wounds.’

He grinned. ‘Very bad year for the plague, this. They were trying to frighten you. Do you feel better? Fever gone down?’

Better? Miraculously all my symptoms had disappeared, and I told Matthew I wished his magic was as effective as his more rational explanations. I hope the poor soldiers will forgive me, but I danced round their grave feeling I could defeat the whole King’s army. At least I was able to attend to them more reverently, searching the rotting jerkin of one, the breeches of the other for some form of identity, but there was none. So we put them in a grave with no marks and I said a short prayer for them and their mothers and sweethearts or wives who would never know whether they were alive or dead.

We eventually came to a fork in the road. Matthew pointed his whip and said that way was Highpoint and the other London, and recommended the latter. I shook my head and pointed to the former.

‘You’ll get no peace, Tom,’ he said quietly.

‘I told you: I want to give it back to its rightful owner,’ I said hotly.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Is that so?’

He said nothing more, but clicked at the horse, and turned the cart on to the Highpoint road.

The house was silent again. The servants were there, or at least I saw a face at a window, but they must have seen me alight from the cart, for they vanished again. The doors in the reception room where Eaton had built the barricade were leaning drunkenly from the hinges. The piled-up furniture had been cleared, and on the floor was a large dark stain. There was no sign of Kate. I reached Frances’s bedroom well ahead of Matthew, lifted the lid of an oak chest, pulling out a drawer, flinging out necklaces and bodice ornaments as if they were playhouse baubles. The drawer looked perfectly normal. I shook it. There was no telltale rattle. I emptied the second drawer. Again there was nothing.

‘You’re lying,’ I said to Matthew as he entered.

‘Tom. When have I ever lied to you?’

‘You may not lie, but you never tell the truth.’

‘Patience, patience. Look at yourself. You’re changing.’

I thought this was another of his jokes, but then looked in a mirror, started and glanced back, almost thinking Eaton, or the spirit of him, was standing behind me. The cut Gardiner had given me had opened up my cheek in a livid wound that turned me from a fresh-faced boy into a man. In the portrait I could see the boy who had run into the Guildhall that day, full of dreams that he would be a freeman and marry the master’s daughter. The man staring back at me from the mirror had dreams, but they were tempered with the first shadows of caution and bitterness. Matthew appeared in the mirror.

‘Do you still want me to open it?’

‘Yes.’

He lifted up a drawer. ‘Look. See the difference between the two thicknesses?’

I snatched it from him and would have battered it open but he stopped me and with irritating slowness showed me the carefully glued wooden plugs that concealed wooden screws. It seemed to take him an age to take out the plugs and screws and remove the false bottom. Cushioned in velvet was the Stonehouse pendant. It was as if the room was on fire. I started back as the falcon seemed to strike at me with its emerald beak. Its nest was a huge, polished ruby, surrounded by a miniature forest of enamelled flowers and insects, set in a framework of gold.

Matthew did not try and stop me now. Whatever power had drawn me to it now silenced him. He watched as I struggled to remember which jewels Lucy Hay had pressed, and in which order. There were two small emeralds, a deeper green than the rest – old mine green, she called it – on the edge of the miniature forest. I held one down, then pressed the other. I ducked as the falcon almost hit me in the eye. The ruby had sprung clear of its mount, exposing an oval space in which a portrait might be kept, or painted. Only there was no portrait.

I had accepted the legend that my father’s picture would stare out at me so completely I sat stunned, unable to believe that there was nothing there, unable to see what was there.

‘Look –’ Matthew pointed to a small piece of folded paper, wedged at the bottom of the compartment.

I remembered what Kate told me my mother had said:
If anything happens to me, give it to the child. In the portrait compartment is my hold on the child’s father.
Not a portrait, but her ‘hold on him’ – whatever that was.

Carefully I teased out the paper and unfolded it, expecting a name, but like the will o’ the wisp, the truth constantly came close, then eluded me. There was no name, but some kind of cipher. My eyes blurred as I struggled to read the letters, for legends are so strong and simple but ultimately absurd. Where would my mother, in the chaos of that day and evening, have found a portrait of my father to put in the pendant she had stolen? What actually must have happened was far more poignant. The wavering letters were a faded brown and did not look as if they had been written in ink. She had got this scrap of paper from somewhere and, in the blood of my birth, had written, with her nail possibly, two words, the latter being so badly smudged I could read only the first letter:

BOWNDERY L—

I read them out to Matthew. He stared at the pendant, then at the floor, scraping his hand against his beard.

‘What does it mean?’

For answer he took me to the copse where we had left our horses the previous night. They had broken free, but I called Patch and eventually found her with the other. We rode to what, just before I was born, was the boundary between the Pearce and Stonehouse estates. Now the fences had gone, it was all Stonehouse land, but Matthew knew exactly where the old boundary was. We tethered our horses by a stream, which he said was the water released by Eaton after Kate had freed him from the trap. Following the stream upwards, we came to a well-worn path crossing it. It was an unexpected sheltered spot, the sort of place in which children delight to hide. A group of trees grew over a jutting lip of rock, under which was a small cavern. The path ran just below it, downwards to Highpoint and upwards in the opposite direction to the ruins of what had once been a house.

‘What’s that?’

There had been a fall of rock in the cavern, and Matthew was clearing it. He looked round, then carried on clearing the rock before he answered. ‘That was where your mother used to live.’

I walked a little way along the path towards it, until I could see from the line where the foundations were it must have been a substantial manor house. Stones had been taken from it for other buildings, leaving one roofless wing, overgrown with ivy. In a few years that too would be gone. I walked slowly back in the cutting wind which snatched at my hat and coat. This must be the path my mother had taken to Highpoint, or to this spot to meet her lover. Or lovers
. I shall have one of them, Kate. Who do you think it shall be?

Matthew had cleared the stones, and crawled to a lower, shadowy part of the cave, feeling over the wall.

‘Did she meet her lovers here?’

He scratched his head. ‘I remember her meeting her cousin.’

‘John Lloyd?’

‘That’s right.’

‘When did he come back from Ireland?’

‘He didn’t. He was killed in the fighting there.’ Matthew cut his finger, swore and sucked it. ‘I used to leave her herbs here.’

‘Love potions?’

‘Something like that.’

Where I had swallowed everything he said as a child, I now recognised the shift in his tone, his evasive grin. ‘Something like that to get rid of me?’

He continued to grope for a moment before saying: ‘Didn’t work very well, did it? . . . Ah!’ He found the niche he was looking for, pulled away a stone, then scrabbled his fingers deeper in to tease something out. I snatched it from him. It was a small pot, stoppered crudely with a piece of flint. L. Letters! Inside the pot was a small bundle of them. When I read them, exactly where my mother had collected them, I recognised the hand immediately and everything that had happened to her that year – and to me, growing inside her – fell into place.

Part Three
Edgehill

October 1642–April 1643

Chapter 39

Once more Matthew and I came to a fork in the road. Again he pointed with his whip. That way was to Warwickshire, that to London. He pleaded with me to take the road south with him, but the pendant, which I now kept close to my skin just as Matthew had done, drew me north like a compass. We embraced each other tightly, silently; then, with a heavy heart, I watched him until he was out of sight, on the road he had taken in the plague cart seventeen years before.

I caught up with the Parliamentary baggage train south of Worcester. No one knew what they were doing, or where they were going – or if they did, they would not tell me. Passing a good-sized inn, I had an inspiration. Eaton had always headed for a town’s main inn. The landlord had barred the door against soldiers, and when I kept hammering on it opened it only to point a pistol in my face. I said my name was Eaton, and I was on Lord Stonehouse’s business. He lowered the pistol a little, stared at my scar, then poured me a small beer and gave me a message sealed with the familiar falcon.

Lord Stonehouse’s letter was curt and to the point, demanding to hear from his steward who, as Eaton had said, had done his dirty work for him for so long.

‘Any reply?’ said the innkeeper.

‘No reply,’ I said.

I spent the night at the inn, setting off at dawn. It was October the twenty-third. Unusually for that autumn there was no rain that day, and the sun came up in a cloudless sky. Lord Stonehouse’s letter had been sent from a manor house in Chadshunt, two hours’ ride away. It told me that all the Stonehouses would be in Warwickshire that day. It touched me that both brothers, although they had taken the opposite side to their father, had written to him. Richard was with Prince Rupert’s cavalry, and Edward was a chaplain with the King’s infantry.

At Chadshunt I was told that Lord Stonehouse was at church in the nearby village of Kineton. The service was almost over. Instead of going in, I prayed outside for God to give me guidance in what I had discovered, and in what to say to Lord Stonehouse. I waited just inside the lych gate. While I was in prayers, the lane outside became as busy as St Paul’s Churchyard, with as many people trying to go one way as the other, and a minister in his black robes trying to force his horse through. There were even hawkers selling protect ive amulets. One held up to me the tattered remains of a pocket Bible, which he claimed had stopped a musket ball and had special powers. For a shilling, it would save my life. I pulled him back so the minister’s horse would get through, and found myself staring into the eyes of Edward Stonehouse. For a moment they were unfamiliar, the blinking desiccated eyes which normally lived behind glasses, surrounded by the whorl of wrinkles formed by constantly squeezing to see. The two armies were now less than two miles apart in places, and a man with good sight might suddenly find himself in the wrong one, let alone someone with blurred vision.

Edward peered down at me. What colour there was in his cheeks left them in an instant. He gave a gabble of terror, saying that the plague child had come from the pit for him and dug his spurs in his horse.

I sprang forward, shouting that I must talk to him and almost caught his reins. But I was hampered on the one side by the hawker, saying surely I wanted to save my life for a shilling, and on the other by two pairs of hands slapping down on my shoulders in a tight grip.

‘I like the scar!’ said Luke.

‘That’ll terrify the Cavaliers!’ said Will.

They fell on me with delight, Will immediately claiming the half crown he had bet that I would be there for the fight, Luke disputing that there would be one.

‘Essex will cut and run, like he’s done before.’

By this time Edward had gone, and I discovered that, once again, I had missed Lord Stonehouse. Luke found out that Lord Stonehouse had left with Essex, and promised to show me where to find him. But when I walked Patch back to their camp there were orders to strike it.

There was a ditch for a privy, but it had become so choked and foul, men preferred to shit where they found themselves. Thousands of men spread over fields and hamlets were struggling to pack their knapsacks and check – or find – their weapons, for theft was rife. They were loaded like pack horses, with pot helmets and body armour – which many discarded in order to move more freely. Musketeers not only had to carry their cumbersome weapons but musket rests and bandoleers of gunpowder charges round their necks. These bounced and rattled in the wind as I saw a familiar shape, head and shoulders above everyone else, lifting his pike.

I could not say I hugged Big Jed, for I could not get my arms round his body, but he squeezed every breath from mine, half-lifting me from the ground.

‘I have something for thee,’ he said. ‘A carrier reached us just after we left Highpoint.’

He took a letter from his knapsack. It looked as if it had travelled from place to place to reach the unit. It was covered with grease marks from a piece of cheese which almost obliterated my name, but my heart thumped painfully as I recognised the childish hand and broke what remained of the seal. I felt a rush of joy and guilt that Anne, who had painstakingly struggled to learn to write that summer, had got a letter through, where I, who wrote so easily, had not even tried. It was short.

I read it, kissed it, folded it to put it in my jerkin, unfolded it, read it again to make sure the words were still there, doing this several times until I realised Luke was watching me, grinning. I stuffed the letter in my jerkin, whereupon Luke opened his to show me his letter from Charity.

‘The war is turning women into writers,’ he said.

The field, which had been crowded, was half-empty. I looked round for Patch, but she was nowhere in sight. Nobody had seen her go. She had become more than a horse to me; she had shared everything since leaving London; she
was
London. People looked at me indifferently as I ran around calling for her.

‘She’s probably been requisitioned,’ said Will. ‘I’ll give you a chit.’

‘I don’t want a bloody chit,’ I screamed at him. ‘I want my horse.’

‘You’re foot. Not cavalry.’

‘I’ve got to find Lord Stonehouse.’

‘Here,’ said Jed, putting a pike, almost three times as tall as myself, into my hand. ‘I’ve just requisitioned it.’

* * *

Towards the end of that morning Edward Stonehouse finally found his way to the Royalist army on high ground overlooking some of the most fertile land in England, an escarpment known locally as Edgehill. Only then, at the sight of his King, did he become calmer. Scarlet standard flying, black armour glittering, Charles was riding through his troops with his officers and peers. He had always portrayed himself as a warrior prince, but Englishmen had not fought one another on English soil since the Wars of the Roses almost two centuries ago. Wars happened elsewhere – in Europe, Ireland or Scotland. In the century so far, all across the great stretch of these green fields had been peace, disturbed only by sporadic food riots. All of Henry VIII’s peers had experienced war abroad; of the peers crowding close to listen to Charles, only one in five had done so. Like their King, most still felt they were performing in a masque. But as he went on, discarding many of his usual flourishes, his voice took on a new strength, an urgency of tone.

‘I see by all your loyal faces . . . that just as no son can relinquish his father, no subject can relinquish his lawful king . . .’

Struggling to focus by squeezing his eyes tight, Edward picked out the familiar shape of his brother, sitting straight on his horse, head bowed.

‘My regal authority being obtained from God, we have marched long in the hope the enemy will realise their error, but now we have come upon them. Matters are to be decided not by the word, but the sword, and we must try the doubtful hazard of war. May the justness of our cause make you courageous, and God make you victorious!’

The resounding cheers reached us on the meadows below. To Will’s disgust, we arrived late and were in the reserves on the left flank, near abandoned farm buildings straddling the Kineton road. I caught a glimpse of the King’s upraised sword and an arm of black armour. The sun came out and glinted on it, and a murmur rippled through the ranks as some soldiers took it as a sign against us. A Puritan preacher responded by chanting: ‘Let the saints be joyful in their glory . . .’ Soldiers round him joined in: ‘Let the high praises of God be in their mouths!’

The single roar of a cannon silenced both the cheers and the chanting.

It was two o’clock. The two armies were now less than a mile apart. Essex had decided it was impracticable to retreat, but was in no hurry to fight. It would be suicidal to attack uphill. His cannon might have dislodged them from their superior position, but the range was too great. Like those of the answering cannon, the balls merely dropped in the soft mud of the meadows. Essex could see several peers grouped round the King. It seemed as though some kind of argument was taking place. The disagreement was between the sixty-year-old Earl of Lindsey, in charge of the infantry, and Richard’s hero, Prince Rupert, who wanted to command the infantry as well as the horse. As Richard, spellbound, watched Lindsey throw down his baton and say if he was not fit to be a general he would die as a colonel at the head of his regiment, he saw his brother. He knew only too well that agitated state and moved to be with him. He put an arm round Edward’s shoulder, calming him as he heard about the devil pursuing him, and led him to the lip of the escarpment. His eyes were as strong as his brother’s were weak. He could see our banner: a red cross lettered with FOR GOD AND PARLIAMENT. He glimpsed my red hair.

‘Has he seen father?’ Richard asked Edward.

‘He was looking for him.’

Richard could see Essex’s banner, a good half mile away on the other flank. He picked me out again, among the pikemen, laughed and said he could see not a drop of lime on me, unfortunately. I was just like the rest, one of the rabble. Edward thanked God for his elder brother supporting him, just as he had done on that dreadful night when he stood up for him before his father, saying the child could not possibly be Edward’s since their relationship was only a few months old.

Fortified by Richard’s support, Edward went as one of the chaplains to Sir Jacob Astley, who had taken over from Lindsey, joining now with especial fervour in his brief prayer: ‘O Lord, thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget thee, do not thou forget me.’

It was mid-afternoon, still clear, but what warmth there had been in the day was beginning to leave it. I was convinced we would not fight that day – there would only be more circling and manoeuvring, more psalms and speeches. Then we saw their cavalry delicately, carefully, almost sedately, picking their way down the steep escarpment. There was a fall of rocks and one horse almost fell. On more gently sloping ground the cavalry broke into a trot, then the trumpet sounded the charge.

Stupidly I watched, thrilled at the sight and sound, the colours of the pennants, the flash of their drawn sabres, as if I was staring at a performance in an arena. I was a boy again, watching the sights of London, the pageantry, the royal processions. Other faces gaped. We were all Londoners, wood turners, tailors, tanners, bakers and printers, carters and watermen. Some still wore the clothes of their trade. We had been rigorously trained, but in drill manoeuvres and weapon orders – there were forty-eight musket orders, and sixty-five for the pike. The only experience of fighting for most of us was as part of the London mob. Like me, most seemed hypnotised by the wonderful spectacle galloping across Kineton meadows towards us.

‘Ground your bloody pike,’ said Jed, who had much less imagination but far more sense.

Muskets were as little use in that first charge as the cannon. A horse was hit and I saw a man’s head disappear, his horse riding on, one hand clutching at the reins, the other at his slipping sabre. Most muskets were fired too soon and there was no time to reload. Their riders came at an angle, smashing into the flank of the Parliamentary cavalry, sweeping through into the first lines of infantry, which duly fled. A man ran screaming towards us, blood spurting from a sabre cut in his neck. He fell, Jed half-stumbling on him before shoving him away.

‘Hold your pikes!’ yelled Will. ‘If you run, you’re dead!’

He stood, beating at and pleading with the fleeing soldiers to stay and fight, while Luke, who had broken all the rules in the reloading of muskets, tried to bring calm to the scattering musketeers with a kind of forced, dazed politeness.

‘Match cord. Reload. Present.’

Whinnying horses, nostrils flaring, were as terrified as the men. One ran at the stand of pikes as if they were a fence at a hunt and came down, impaling himself, yellow guts spilling out on a meadow that was disappearing into churned-up mud. The bandoleer of gunpowder charges round the neck of one of Luke’s musketeers caught alight, one charge setting off another. The man spun round like a screaming firework, beating at his burning clothes, falling into the back of our line as the thrashing, dying horse fell into the front. Slashing, hacking, the Cavaliers cut through and careered straight on. Only one checked his horse and wheeled. Even at that moment I thought it a superb piece of horsemanship. Richard was crouched low on the saddle, the slightest of smiles on his face, focusing his whole being on the point not the blade. I was transfixed by the sight, the blade inches from me, when there was a great roar, more animal than man. Jed brought up the butt of his pike, deflecting the blade. Richard slashed at him. Jed stumbled, dropping his pike. Screaming, I brought up my pike. Richard’s horse reared, almost unseating him, before he was swept on by the hindmost of the charging horses.

Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, they were gone, carrying a group of our stationary horses with them. If they had turned on our rear, it would all have been over. But they were no more disciplined than we were. The fleeing troops were to them like so many foxes, vermin who troubled their estates, but who also gave them the delight of the hunt. They rode down and killed stragglers for about two miles, until they reached the Parliamentary baggage trains at Kineton, and then they looted.